At Night I Marry The Bed

February 15, 2017

I left my very first and only Silver Bullet vibrator in a bedroom in a large share house in Kensal Green, North London to be exact. It was 2009 and I had been happily flipping my own bean for about 4 years. I did not realize my diminutive implement of happy endings was missing until I was in Manchester. I had expected to find it while unpacking my suitcase in the bedroom of the house I would be living n and working as a nanny. I owed rent to the place in London and did not have the money. I could hardly call up Patrick the creepy live in landlord and ask if he had come across my vibrator while cleaning out my side of the bedroom. It was not all that large or expensive and I think the one double A battery that made it work had run out. I had become a little addicted to its magic as it had helped curb my initial intense homesickness and sexual frustration.

Growing up in a Mormon household (The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints). There’s a musical about us. The church had guidelines for every aspect of your life. One of the things that is considered wrong and unholy in the eyes of the lord, was masturbation.

Yes that delightful, harmless and disease free past time was considered gross and dirty. This is so funny and inexplicable to me now that I stand before you a proud and defiant apostate of the church. Apostate is just a fancy way of saying that I decided through a process of transgressions and starting to think for myself, that perhaps the church was not as great or good for me as my parents and relatives had tried to make me believe.

There is a little pamphlet that you get as soon as you turn 12. It is called For The Strength Of Youth. Inside the pages are some very lovingly written, if not condescendingly, information that invites you to dress modestly and save yourself, your sexy parts and feelings for your husband or wife. It says you are not to ‘arouse sexual feeling in your own body’. In the pamphlet you are told that Homosexuality and Lesbianism ‘is a serious sin’. You are told same sex attraction saddens the lord. ”It’s Adam and Eve. Not Adam and Steve!” This was a statement I heard hundreds of times while growing up.

Everything fun makes god sad and it confuses me that the person up stairs created all this stuff and then said ‘don’t touch any of it’.

Masturbation was not discussed. Sex was not discussed, consent and feeling safe or what constitutes a healthy relationship was not discussed.

When I was 13 I was visiting my friend from church Claire, she had an 11 year old brother. While I was visiting, his parents caught him rubbing his crotch up and down the pantry door. He had obviously just discovered how amazing it felt.

My friend and I watched as her brother was taken into the living room and sat down for a talk. We listened through the closed door. It was all so funny to us. What was he doing that for?

He could have simply been told that it was something to do in the privacy of your bedroom. He was instead told that it was not right. He was told that, ‘You just don’t do it.’ ‘Just don’t do it’ is basically the cornerstone of the Mormon religion.

I never understood why the church told young people not to masturbate. It was disease and pregnancy risk free. Did you really want to be so very ignorant about what made you feel sexually wonderful on your wedding night? Wouldn’t it be better if you could help steer your brand new spouse around the map of your body? Have the vocabulary and confidence to say what you needed? No. Refrain from all of it and you shall remain pure in the eyes of the lord. That creep was always watching you with love and judgement.

Which is why I did not discover the joys of self -love until I was 23 and had been living out of home since I was 16. The guilt and shame surrounding sex is something that I found difficult to unlearn.

I got a job on the tropical holiday destination of the wealthy: Hamilton Island. The job involved cleaning up fancy apartments, after rich young adults had partied and puked and left grand amounts of alcohol behind. Because, when you are rich like that, you waste shit. The other cleaners and I would collect it and sneak it back to our rooms.

I was still a virgin at this stage and when the rumour that Hamilton Island had the highest rate of STDs in Australia. I got scared and decided I was not loosing my V while on an island full of people who may or may not have the disease that gives you cluster warts on you genitals.

It was there with the warm breezes and sounds of the ocean floating through my window, that I slowly entered the wonder and majesty of self- reliant sexual pleasure. It was all very tentative at first, just a small and nervous hand caressing the stomach and slowly, very freaking slowly it moved towards the front of my underwear. over the knickers and until I found the spot that made my heart start humming and a feeling that was so so good it amazed me that I had been made to feel so bad about it and put off doing it for so long. You could say that my working holiday on a tropical island was also a sort of honeymoon period for myself.

It was not jus that it felt good. Learning to make my own body feel sexually aroused was a huge deal. My body up until that point, had never really felt like my own. It always felt like it was being shared or dissected or cut open and my insides moved around or added to. My body was a slab of malfunctioning meat and it was not nusual for it to be stripped down and stared at by multiple medical professionals at a time. It did not happen all at once, this awakening and feeling like my body could be sexual. When you ar a kid with a body that is fascinating medically, it is easy to feel like you have no control over what happens to you and the skin you are in. While on that tropical island I discovered that I had way more control over my body than I was led to believe. Learning how to make this body sing a little and learning what caresses worked and the ones that didn’t, was like a whole new world was right under my nose and I had the magic key.

All that wasted time reading the Book Of Mormon in preparation for the end of days. All that time spent believing that Jesus is going to come to earth a second time and you better be on the right and sexually pure side when he arrives. What a wasted adolescence. I wonder if I would not have been so sad had I known how to make myself feel like the second coming of Christ, without the judgement and the end of the world.

After that I became aware that it was great for calming my nerves or helping me fall asleep. What an invention of the human nervous system. To think all through uni, I thought if I did anything like this, it indicated I could not get a boyfriend. Thanks to the church really pushing the whole hetero-normative patriarchal, only get sexy when its your husband helping, ideology. I thought fluffing my own cream puff, indicated that I was as ugly and doomed to die alone, as all those truly horrendous and lame Mormon dances had me believing. It did not prove anything except independence.

I did not need a girlfriend/boyfriend. I only needed my clean hands, a sexy imagination and a quiet moment.